eMoney E-Banking Service Enjoy the convenience and convenience of life by always using e-money

Category: eMoney

Summary

Using historical Bitcoin price data, it is possible to model different buying behaviors.

Buying during hype periods has been a losing strategy when combined with ‘weak hands’.

Simply holding or buying the dip have been winning strategies for Bitcoin historically.

After the disastrous start to the year for Bitcoin (COIN, OTCQX:GBTC), many investors have been left wondering how to proceed. One on hand, investors who witnessed the end of year rallies in 2017 know how quickly the market can turn around and do not want to be left behind if Bitcoin surges. On the other hand, the sharp corrections often following bull runs have left an indelible impression on investors and many now patiently anticipate these corrections before buying in. In this article, we’ll show an analysis of historical data to attempt to shed light on how best to invest in Bitcoin.

FOMO

FOMO, or the Fear of Missing Out, has been exemplified by the rush of investors buying in during the latest Bitcoin bull run in late 2017. Many investors not only rushed to buy in, but bought on margin or using credit, which can never be recommended for such a volatile asset. The idea behind FOMO stems from a very primitive herd mentality instinct. If one observes Bitcoin rising by $1,000 every few minutes, as seen during the height of the madness, one naturally extrapolates the trend and forgets the downside.

To simulate FOMO behavior, we’ll use historical intraday Bitcoin prices as well as Google trends data, both pulled from the Cryptory package in Python. This data begins in April 2013, which is a good starting point for us, as Bitcoin had climbed to over $100 and was beginning to become more widely known. In this simulation, we’ll follow FOMO Fred, who exhibits the following behavior meant to model an investor who buys in during periods of hype and then panic sells during subsequent dips

BREAKING DOWN ‘Virtual Currency’

Virtual currency can be defined as an electronic representation of monetary value that may be issued, managed and controlled by private issuers, developers, or the founding organization. Such virtual currencies are often represented in terms of tokens and may remain unregulated without a legal tender. Unlike regular money, it relies on a system of trust and may not be issued by a central bank or other banking regulatory authority. Due to the lack of a centralized regulatory authority, such virtual currencies are prone to wide swings in their valuations. They derive their value based on the underlying mechanism, like mining in cases of cryptocurrencies, or the backing by the underlying asset.

The term came into existence around 2012, when the European Central Bank (ECB) defined virtual currency to classify types of“digital money in an unregulated environment, issued and controlled by its developers and used as a payment method among members of a specific virtual community,” according to Bitcoins News.

Along with use by the common public, a virtual currency can have restricted usage, and it may be in circulation only among the members of a specific online community or a virtual group of users who transact online on dedicated networks. Virtual currencies are mostly used for peer-to-peer payments and are finding increasing use for purchase of goods and services.

Difference between Digital, Virtual, and Crypto Currencies

Digital currency is the overall superset that includes virtual currency, which in turn includes cryptocurrencies.

Compared to a virtual currency, a digital currency covers a larger group that represents monetary assets in digital form. Digital currency can be regulated or unregulated. In the former case, it can be denominated to a sovereign currency – that is, a country’s central bank can issue a digital form of its fiat currency notes. On the other hand, a virtual currency often remains unregulated and hence constitutes a type of digital currency.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are considered to be a part of the virtual currency group. A cryptocurrency uses cryptography technology that keeps the transactions secure and authentic, and also helps to manage and control the creation of new currency units. Such cryptocurrencies exist and are transacted over dedicated blockchain based networks which are open to the common public. Anyone can join and start transacting in cryptocurrencies.

Developer Gabriel Cardona was personally recruited to fast track development of Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Open source, full featured development kit, Bitbox, his creation, has taken the community by storm, and it is now part of the Bitcoin.com developer universe. Money, Mr. Cardona likes to say, is critical to the human condition. And BCH and its blockchain are enabling financial sovereignty in a way which, he believes, is unique in history.

Developer Gabriel Cardona Seeks a Path to Change the World Through Bitcoin Cash

This week, developer Gabriel Cardona was guest for a full hour on the Vin Armani Show. At about the one hour and eight minute mark, Mr. Cardona began to lay out reasoning behind the burst of innovation in development on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.

Images edited by Shanty

With hotshot initial coin offerings ringing-in billions, venture capitalists pouring money into project after project, and nearly all crypto talk dominated by speculative price analysis, idealism is hardly ever mentioned. There is almost a sense of innocence lost, having given way to strange corporate realism. When idealism is employed, derision and condescension aren’t too far behind nowadays. Mr. Cardona, however, champions bitcoin cash as “the soundest money the world has ever known. As a developer you can make it available to all people, whatever their age, gender, nationality or financial status,” he explained to Vin Armani, founder of Coin Text, the text messaging way to send BCH without an internet connection.

Mr. Cardona describes himself, 37, as a decidedly different person professionally, “a whole different frequency” only ten years ago. He spent most of his twenties vagabonding, playing music, traveling. Becoming a father around this time sobered him to clearer thoughts about a career going forward. A chance community college course led to his first project, then another, and another. For whatever reason, the web has always resonated with him. The ubiquity, the chance to be impactful on a large scale, appealed to Mr. Cardona professionally.

That professional path eventually led him to code for Walmart, Target, Taco Bell, and to Triple A — all web development projects. Somewhere along the line, 2012 ish, he discovered bitcoin and Gavin Andresen’s Faucet, where Mr. Cardona received five bitcoin. This kept him interested as he went about his regular career. In fact, he’d put the idea aside for years while keeping an ear and eye to key hacker news outlets. When talk about a fork in mid 2017 was heating up, Mr. Cardona described the inevitable as not optimum, certainly, but ultimately the right path when two factions just cannot agree.

The Revelation

From there he deduced one of the chains would eventually have an innovation explosion. When he was able to access bitcoin cash (BCH) coins, and he started to use them, it suddenly grabbed him completely: this is bitcoin, the tech that made a great many wonderful people fall in love. Still, he wasn’t yet convinced enough to enter the space in any permanent way. In fact, he took to the burgeoning 3D printer industry. Upon looking more deeply into smart contracts, he encountered Ethereum’s Truffle Suite. He describes this as a revelation.

It was shocking. Nothing like a good framework, a suite of abstractions, allowing developers to work ten times faster existed for Bitcoin. There wasn’t anything like it in the BCH space. With that realization, he coincidentally took some time off to try and “have the vision.” It’s this kind of talk that makes Mr. Cardona so compelling. Devs are not known for their ability to communicate vulnerabilities, to be, well, human. Mr. Cardona has that in spades.

That in-touch-ness no doubt sets him apart. He’s humble enough to know he needs mentors, guides, to help check himself along the way. Enter Pete Flint, 44, a British entrepreneur now based in San Francisco at the venture capital firm, NFX, where he is a managing partner. Mr. Fint is perhaps best known for having been founder and CEO of Trulia, which he eventually sold for something like a billion dollars. Mr. Cardona worked there for a spell, and the two hit it off. On his break to “have the vision,” he met up again with Mr. Flint.

That was half a year ago. Mr. Cardona credits Mr. Flint with urging him to move from hardware to software, and onto to BCH solutions. That very night Mr. Cardona began working on a library that morphed into framework, and has now become the solution platform, Bitbox. An immediate success, having been downloaded tens of thousands of times in a very short period, Bitbox got the attention of nearly everyone in The Know. Two months ago he joined Bitcoin.com to put Bitbox into full-on practice. For the un-technical, Bitbox assumes many functions every dev needs, thus speeding up a project’s process, allowing innovation to come at much faster paces. The implications for its power are simply mind-blowing. As Vin Armani commented during the interview, had something like Bitbox been available as little as three years ago for Bitcoin, everything would’ve changed. That it’s now an intimate part of BCH means the future of money is on a Cardona path.

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, a Bitcoin permabull known for his optimistic price targets for the dominant cryptocurrency, has said that Bitcoin will likely end the year explosively higher possibly at $20,000.

In an interview with CNBC, Lee stated that over the past year, Bitcoin, which has failed to show a correlation with the broader financial market and traditional assets like gold, has demonstrated a similar mid-term price movement as emerging markets.

“Both really essentially peaked early this year, and they both have been in a downward trend. Until emerging markets begin to turn, I think in some ways that correlation is going to hold and tell us that sort of the risk on mentality is those buyers aren’t buying bitcoin,” said Lee.

Turn in Emerging Markets Will Lead Bitcoin to Rise?

Lee suggested that the strong performance of assets and ETFs based on emerging markets will likely lead to the increase in the price of Bitcoin, given the correlation between the two dating back to early 2017.

The conflict between the US and Turkey, Iran, China, and other countries could lead to a decline in the value of the US dollar, especially if the Federal Reserve slows its interest rate hike policy, and that could also contribute to an increase in the price of Bitcoin, Lee explained.

He added:

“So why do we think they’re connected? Well, there is two factors. The first is hedge funds — see hedge funds typically rent emerging market stocks. So they do risk-on, risk-off. So when they’re risk-off, Bitcoin also suffers because they are risk off. The second reason has to do with wealth effect. Wealth effect means that if you are living in an emerging market, and you see your stock market fall hugely, that you will have a lot less money to buy Bitcoin.”

Last week, CCN reported that Germany officially proposed the development of a global financial system outside of the control of the US, due to the intensifying conflict between the US and Iran.

Heiko Maas, German foreign minister serving in the fourth cabinet of Angela Merkel since March of this year, said:

“For that reason it’s essential that we strengthen European autonomy by establishing payment channels that are independent of the US, creating a European Monetary Fund and building up an independent Swift system.”

Kim Dotcom, a German-Finnish entrepreneur said that considering the announcement of Germany is the first call for an independent financial system in the European finance sector, if Germany pursues its agenda, the value of the US dollar will likely fall, leading to the rise in the price of Bitcoin.

$20,000 by 2018

Still, despite the weak performance of emerging market ETFs, Lee expects the price of Bitcoin to surpass $20,000 by the end of 2018, expecting a large rally like the December price movement of Bitcoin in 2017.

If emerging markets recover by the year’s end and developments in the global finance industry gear towards the devaluation of the US dollar, Lee believes the price of Bitcoin will experience an explosive movement before December.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

The post Tom Lee: Bitcoin to Hit $20k in 2018 Despite Struggle of Emerging Markets appeared first on CCN.

The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network experienced over 2.1 million transactions on September 1 as a result of the recently launched BCH stress test, according to data from BitInfoCharts.

Bitcoin Cash transactions historical chart. Source: BitInfoCharts

The “stress test” is a community driven test of the BCH mainnet and its services, according to the BCH stress test website. The test aims to process “millions of minimum fee transactions” within 24 hours in order to prove the Bitcoin Cash blockchain’s capacity and scalability, as well as to provide data for developers and business running their services and decentralized applications (DApps) on the BCH network.

The stress test was conducted on September 1, ten weeks before the reportedly scheduled November upgrade, and is “hopefully” set to take place on an annual basis.

As a result of the Bitcoin Cash stress test, the share of Bitcoin Cash transactions amounted to 63 percent of all crypto transactions for the past 24 hours to press time, according to BitInfoCharts. The second currency in terms of number of transactions per day is Ethereum (ETH).

Cryptocurrency transactions per last 24h. Source: BitInfoCharts

During the stress test, the number of microtransactions on the BCH network surged up to 14,300 per block, according to data from Coin Dance. According to Fork.lol, the number of transactions even reached 25,783 per block, up from the usual average interval of 90 to 150 transactions per block. To compare, the average number of transactions per block for Bitcoin (BTC) amounts to 1,000 to 1,500.

Average number of BTC and BCH transactions per block chart. Source: Coin Dance

Average number of BTC and BCH transactions per block chart. Source: Fork.lol

According to BitInfoCharts, Bitcoin Cash average transactions fees have not increased, actually seeing a small decline from $0.002 to $0.0017.

Software Engineer Jameson Lopp commented in a tweet that the Bitcoin Cash stress test “has succeeded in breaking various transaction and mempool visualizers.”

In mid-August, Cointelegraph reported that there are now fewer holders of Bitcoin Cash, as well as a decreased use of the cryptocurrency in commerce. According to a study by Chainanalysis, BCH payments dropped to $3.7 million in May from $10.5 million in March.

On Friday, Cointelegraph reported that Initial Coin Offering (ICO) advisory firm Satis Group forecast in a study that Bitcoin Cash will drop to as low as $268, as it attempts to “inherit brand recognition” while providing “minimal technological advantage to incumbents.” The same report has stated that Bitcoin’s price could potentially soar to $98,000 in the next five years.

As Cointelegraph reported earlier today, Bitcoin Cash’s price has shot up following the stress test, as the coin sees the biggest gains over the past 24 hours among top 20 cryptocurrencies by market cap. At press time, Bitcoin Cash is trading at $635, up around 3.1 percent over a 24 hour period and 21.5 percent over the the week, according to CoinMarketCap.

Bitcoin Has Swung 10% In Seven Days — Is It Really More Stable?

Bitcoin, as well as the wider cryptocurrency market, has been struggling with stability for years. Over the past 12 months, bitcoin has climbed from around $5,000 to an eye-watering near $20,000 before sharply falling back this year.

The bitcoin price is now hovering around the $7,000 mark.

Later this month the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) is due to make a decision on whether to grant approval for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund — something the SEC has previously rejected due to fears around bitcoin’s wild price swings and price manipulation.

The bitcoin price has swung from under $6,000 to almost $8,500 over the last three months.CoinDesk

A bitcoin exchange-traded fund would make it easier for investors to buy into bitcoin, potentially injecting a fresh wave of capital into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, many of which are almost pegged to bitcoin.

Ahead of the SEC decision, cryptocurrency trading technology firm SFOX has found there has been a drop-off in price variations on digital asset exchanges so far this year, suggesting the entrance of large Wall Street firms into the market is making bitcoin more stable.

Now bitcoin and cryptocurrency price differences are no more than one-tenth of 1%, according to SFOX.

“Before institutional firms were actively trading crypto or heavily involved (before 2018) bitcoin price differences between exchanges varied as high as 4.5%,” Danny Kim, head of growth at SFOX, told Business Insider.

Wall Street giants such as Goldman Sachs and ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, have signaled they are keen to begin offering cryptocurrency trading to clients, while money managers, hedge funds, and endowments have also been entering the market.

However, there has been a big new change in bitcoin trading this year: A significant rise in bitcoin shorting, where investors bet the price will fall.

Bitcoin short positions have been nudging their all-time highs during the past month, signaling that traders are giving up hope that bitcoin will maintain its current price of over $7,200.

On September 1, a 10,000 bitcoin short position was opened. Bitcoin shorts first reached their highest year-to-date position on April 9, while bitcoin was trading at around $7,000.

Bitcoin short positions have more than doubled since the beginning of the year. TradingView A lot of overly confident short positions mean the bitcoin price can be pushed quickly higher, due to so-called short squeezes — and this has already happened a few times in the last few months.

Despite these bets against the bitcoin price, Kim is confident more institutional money in bitcoin will mean long-term stability.

“As this trend continues, the stabilizing effects of institutional investment will extend beyond price spreads, and on to price fluctuations,” Kim said.

“Eventually, it could even come to the point where bitcoin could come to resemble the stable coins people are looking to for payments and is used for Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision: a “Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”

Last month SFOX announced the closure of a $22.7 million Series A funding round with participation from Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk and is aiming to make it easier for institutions to “trade from a single account” and “buy and sell high volumes without impacting prices”.

DEFINITION of ‘Digital Currency’

A digital currency is a form of currency that is available only in digital or electronic form, and not in physical form. It is also called digital money, electronic money, electronic currency, or cyber cash.

BREAKING DOWN ‘Digital Currency’

Digital currencies are intangible and can only be owned and transacted in by using computers or electronic wallets which are connected to the Internet or the designated networks. In contrast, the physical currencies, like bank notes and minted coins, are tangible and transactions are possible only by their holders who have their physical ownership.

Images by Acnes

Like any standard fiat currency, digital currencies can be used to purchase goods as well as to pay for services, though they can also find restricted use among certain online communities, like gaming sites, gambling portals, or social networks.

Digital currencies have all intrinsic properties like a physical currency, and they allow for instantaneous transactions that can be seamlessly executed for making payments across the borders when connected to supported devices and networks. For instance, it is possible for an American to make payments in a digital currency to a distant counterparty residing in Singapore, provided that they both are connected to the same network required for transacting in the digital currency.

Digital currencies offer numerous advantages. As payments in digital currencies are made directly between the transacting parties without the need of any intermediaries, the transactions are usually instantaneous and zero- to low-cost. This fares better compared to traditional payment methods that involve banks or clearing houses. Digital currency based electronic transactions also bring in the necessary record keeping and transparency in dealings.
Difference between Digital, Virtual, and Crypto Currencies

Since they exist in a lot of variants, digital currencies can be considered a superset of virtual currencies and cryptocurrencies.

If issued by a central bank of a country in a regulated form, it is called the “Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).” While the CBDC only exists in conceptual form, England, Sweden and Uruguay are few of the nations that have considered plans to launch a digital version of their native fiat currencies.

Along with the regulated CBDC, a digital currency can also exist in unregulated form. In the latter case, it qualifies for being called a virtual currency and may be under the control of the currency developer(s), the founding organization, or the defined network protocol, instead of being controlled by a centralized regulator. Examples of such virtual currencies include cryptocurrencies, and coupon- or rewards-linked monetary systems.

A cryptocurrency is another form of digital currency which uses cryptography to secure and verify transactions and to manage and control the creation of new currency units. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the most popular cryptocurrencies. Since cryptocurrencies are unregulated, they are also considered to be virtual currencies. (See also, ‘Bitcoin Is Like Regular Currency’: St. Louis Fed.)

Essentially, both virtual currencies and cryptocurrencies are considered as forms of digital currencies.